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Pandemic impacts, earnings, Zoom, M&A

  • May 4, 2020
  • Analyst: Philbert Shih

It was a busy week as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact the infrastructure services market across the board. Earnings season has kicked off and we got a first look at some of the impact the pandemic is having. There was also M&A activity and more hyperscale data centre expansion.

It was probably the busiest week of the earnings season for infrastructure and there was a lot of anticipation around how AWS would do. Unsurprisingly, it continues to grow, but the verdict on COVID-19’s impact is probably still a few months away (we have details). Clearly content is driving cloud usage and on the CDN side, Limelight Networks saw some positive impact, though there was some offsetting – also a theme with AWS.

Zoom has been the poster boy for working from home as usage on this platform has gone through the roof. In a huge upset, Zoom confirmed this past week that it would expand on Oracle Cloud as it tries to meet its escalating capacity requirements. Meanwhile, email has clearly spiked in use and Open-Xchange in Germany shared some interesting data points about its traffic patterns.

On the M&A front, there were two deals of note. Digital Colony acquired a data centre platform in Brazil that it will take to market under the flag Scala Data Centers, while Globe Telecom acquired Cascadeo as it moves into managed third party cloud services.

Elsewhere, there were a number of cloud wins, particularly in professional sports. The NBA is building its infrastructure with data and analytics a big theme, while the NFL had its first ever virtual player draft. All of this ran on the cloud. In financial services, Nasdaq launched a service running on AWS and Onguard used Rackspace private cloud in Europe.

The criticality of digital infrastructure means more cloud and the data centre capacity to support it. Interxion continues to build in Paris to accommodate growing hyperscale platformsAlibaba is committing to more cloud expansion and more speculative platforms are looking to jump into markets like Dublin, which has become a home for hyperscale.

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